258 THE BATTLE OF BALACLAVA. chap, horsemen going abreast. Of necessity, therefore,
- • his people who had hitherto followed him strictly
msisoia- now had to seek out other paths for their still tion. i continuing onslaught. Some, by bending a little, when necessary, to their right or to their left, found gangways more or less broad for their passage through the ranks of the artillery - car- riages, and others made good their advance by sweeping round the flanks of the battery, but a few only were able to follow close on the track of their leader, and all these, sooner or later, were cut off from him by the incidents of battle. His advance In this way it happened that Lord Cardigan Inwards a J , -, large tody had already become almost entirely isolated, of Russian . ' . „ cavalry. when, still pursuing his onward course, he found himself riding down singly towards a large body of Eussian cavalry, then distant, as he has since reckoned, about eighty yards from the battery. This cavalry was retreating, but presently it came to a halt, went about, and fronted. Lord Car- digan stopped, and at this time he was so near to the enemy's squadrons that he has reckoned the intervening distance at so little as twenty yards. The same phenomenon which had en- forced the attention of some of Scarlett's dragoons in the morning now presented itself under other conditions to Lord Cardigan. All along the con- fronting ranks of the grey -coated horsemen, he found himself hungrily eyed by a breed of the human race whose numberless cages of teeth stared out with a wonderful clearness from be- tween the writhed lips, and seemed all to be
